The Immortal Game
by Pippi Longstockings
Summary: A series of snapshots of James T. Kirk and Spock as they find themselves and each other through chess. This is Academy era and after. Slightly AU but basically intended to incorporate the Movie. Warnings *SLASH*. Temporary hiatus: should post something in a week or so. :)
1. e4 e5 2 f4

A/N: I hope you like it so far. It is currently 100% un-beta'd. This means: 1) I would love someone to volunteer! 2) I would love constructive criticism via review. I know my writing style is kinda dense!

Mildly unrelated fanvid can be found by typing *Star Trek* Safe and Sound into the 'Tube.

**e4 e5 2. f4**

The King's gambit. White offers his pawn in exchange for faster development. This move is almost obsolete; there are many more sophisticated defensive plays available in the modern game.

**Thesis.**

Amanda watched as her son trailed one long, pale, reluctantly intrigued finger over the little gem-stone pieces before him. They were rough cut, deliberately evoking without really depicting what each was, just half-emerging from the coloured stones like butterflies from a chrysalis. He had plucked at a squat, rotund little lump of milky jade, the first etchings of an historic mitre and deeply gauged Coptic cross. He fingered it gently, considerately, and his mother was left wondering not for the first time what faint impressions those deft and sensitive digits managed to glean from nearly everything he touched.

Vulcan children were taught to shield almost before they could walk but some little rebellious part of Amanda was secretly glad that her son was doing what every human child would do, playing with the gifts they were born with and testing them out.

"Mother, were Terran prelates often in the habit of waging warfare?"

"Well, darling, Earth – much like Vulcan – has past that civilisation has moved us away from. Many branches of faith used to be corrupt, ambitious institutions…" She paused catching that almost stray flicker of something deep in his dark eyes. "Darling, did you just make a joke?"

The impassive face did not so much as twitch but she saw it, that sly hint of self-deprecation at the left corner of his mouth. Sometimes she wondered if the parental bond, lying dormant in her psi-null consciousness, sometimes made itself known regardless, or maybe it was just fifteen years of exposure to the moods of a stubborn Vulcan and a small dollop of mother's intuition.

"Of sorts, mother, although it was not an altogether sound attempt. My research informs me that senior clerics of the order of Bishop would rarely wear the garb of a monk – a quite separate species, if I understand correctly. Habit, therefore, was used in an imprecise sense. Did that detract from the anticipated outcome?"

Amanda could feel the proud smile nearly splitting her cheeks. "Oh darling, it was just perfect. But, please don't feel obliged to make the effort on my behalf. I'm sure your father would disapprove."

His impenetrable gaze observed her for a long moment. "I… find that eliciting a pleasurable response from you is something that gratifies me."

Clearly uncomfortable leaving that sentiment to stand alone, Spock quickly added, "Besides, Terran Standard is a most intriguing language. I was reading a xeno-linguistic paper on the influence of a culture on the formation of its language and vice versa; humour was one area particularly that was found to be constrained in some cultures by the extent and flexibility of its language. Thetalians, for instance, have no negative vocabulary as we might understand it and consequently the concepts of understatement and 'dark humour' are unavailable to them. Sarcasm, however, as I understand it, is very highly developed."

A minute drawing together of those acute brows, "Although I myself do not fully understand the significance of this 'dark humour'." Amanda took in the serious little face, the cap of shining dark hair, those adorable little ears and tried her hardest to keep a straight face.

He continued, "Since Standard is the culmination of multiple Terran root-languages and dialects and is ever expanding to assimilate with new lexical input from Federation planets, it is arguably the best suited to facilitate communication, and, indeed, find common ground for humour. The pun is merely an example of its most basic Anglo-Saxon heritage." Amanda felt nothing short of delight flood her breast as he delivered his severe, adult lecture, voice cracking and breaking with all the universal awkwardness of puberty. His long black lashes fluttered as his stare flicked down to the board, betraying no embarrassment, "An experiment, if you will."

"Feel free to experiment on me whenever you like, Sweetie." His hidden exasperation with the maternal endearment was so similar to a Human child of thirteen years old that Amanda had to swallow a grin. She didn't tease him nearly as much as she would like to.

He picked up the jade Bishop and delicately placed him down on the inlaid Terran board, "Check in two, mother." She quickly scanned the options, not liking what she saw.

"Oh Spock, you've beaten me again! You really must promise to go easy on your poor illogical mother!"

His reply was calm and inflectionless but the whisper of fond chiding clung to it like gossamer, "Mother, I spend on average ten point six-three solars per day exercising and improving my understanding of strategic algorithms and attendant probabilities. I will always have the advantage in a game which, although cleverly disguised by these antiquated Terran feudal symbols, is fundamentally logical." Amanda once again found herself suppressing the mild flicker of irritation at being patronisingly reminded that she was deemed part of an illogical species by her own son with her genuine pride at her son's staggering intellect. Once again, uncannily, Spock seemed to sense her flash of wounded pride and responded to it,

"Besides, mother, I believe since we initiated this ritual game with the chess set of your father nine point three-six years ago, I still have a deficit of seventeen games in which to achieve a win before I can be said to have truly beaten you."

Translation: "You thrashed me when I was four."

"I am… grateful that you save this time for me, Spock, I know you're very busy."

His gaze was suddenly startling direct and Amanda had a moment to see the irony of a Vulcan having such treacherously expressive eyes. "I appreciate this time also, Mother. I understand that you do not have many companions with whom to engage in Terran pursuits and I would not wish you to be… adversely affected by this. Humans use such interactive puzzles as a way to interact and form social bonds as you claim you did with your own father. I see such a codified system of expressing emotion not to be without merit for Humans."

It wasn't a lot, but it was as close to an 'I love you' as she was going to get. Amanda once again greedily stored it away in her precious trove of little allowances Spock made for her in his blank Vulcan façade and recognised it for the gift it was.

**Antithesis.**

"Yo, Tiberius!"

"Wait up, Tiberius!"

"Tiberius, don't you want to play with us anymore?"

The sing-song voices pursued him down the dusty highway but he didn't change his pace. He wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of running away.

"Where's your daddy, Tiberius? Where's your daddy to save you this time, huh?"

They were much older, considerably taller, and were gaining on him. He could hear the tempo their footsteps where crunching out on the hard-shoulder.

His eyes, corn blue, instinctively looked for options. Riverside town suburbs was in hazy clapboard relief behind them but the long, empty track into the baked farmlands revealed no refuge, no shelter in sight up ahead. Wide, flat and deserted, corn stalks only shallow at this time of year and pale in the beginnings of twilight. It was muggy, hot, and the back of his neck was damp.

He felt a hand on his shoulder a moment before he was roughly jerked around.

Bullies were ubiquitous creatures; he had a moment to laugh to himself before a meaty fist connected hard with his left cheekbone. Beefy, slow, piggy-eyed. A moment of pity and contempt as he felt the bruise already starting to ripen richly under his eye. It may be an elite Fleet feeder school, but even these were apparently not immune to the evolutionary inevitabilities of High School.

"Come on, Kirk, How'd'ya do it, huh? How'd'ya get all the answers, you little creep?"

Ah, Ad Math Pop Quiz results. Public, apparently.

He felt himself being lifted off the ground by his shirt collar, shaken roughly. He wasn't large for an eleven-year-old. He wasn't much effort to manhandle. He pursed his lips into a stubborn line.

"You little cheat. Teacher's pet, huh, Tiberius? Think you can fit in with the big boys?"

The piggiest of them all was evidently enjoying this, wrapping his thick tongue around the syllables of his grandfather's name like it was some kind of insult. Jim inwardly rolled his eyes and bit down on a retort that was likely to lose him some teeth. Starfleet were seriously scraping the barrel with this particular specimen.

Another thing to hold against them.

Another rough shake and something jabbed roughly into his gut; he crunched involuntarily, coughing, and the boys laughed. "Who're you trying to impress, huh? Mummy doesn't care. And where's Sammy, now, eh?"

Seriously, someone, give this smartass a medal. It was like someone a written him a fucking script. It's not as though he hadn't had worse. Frank could give lessons.

Jim really, really resented living in small town. The Starfleet dockyards may not be far, but that didn't stop his home being the shitty little Hicksville backwater it had always been. Maybe the clientele of the bars were a little more diverse the night before an Academy in-take, but he was too young to know much more about that than Sam chose to tell him. Sam still seemed to think Starfleet was the answer to all life's problems. That, and alcohol.

The same Starfleet that killed their dad, that their mum used to hide from them, that spouted the same old shit about truth, justice and freedom and cuddling fucking Romulans.

He smirked and felt his lip split with a sharp sting and an iron tang on the tip of his tongue.

His older brother Sam had disappeared in a roar of engines, a cloud of badly combusted hydrocarbons and a spray of gravel hours before. He'd been threating to hitch a ride at the Port for months. Maybe one day he'd do it. Maybe he just had. Sam had flunked every class for two years. There was no way he was graduating any time soon.

Jim absently wondered why he didn't just follow his example and skip out on school. Then again, he considered as he briefly felt gravity take over before impacting hard on the cracked tarmac, where exactly was he supposed to go? An eleven year-old on a rusty push bike who had already taken every Advanced class his school had to offer. A scuffed trainer impacted dully against his side.

"Little fucker. Next time you cheat you share the fucking answers, genius."

He coughed and spat, grit mixed with the red tinge of his saliva. H kept his voice carefully neutral.

"Sure, Lloyd, whatever."

The leader huffed an incredulous laugh of sorts. A last half-hearted kick stubbed into his side.

"Creep."

"'Til next time, Tiberius."

He could hear their heavy footsteps retreating, back the way they had come. It never took them long to lose interest if he just shut up and took it. They were too much of cowards to do much worse to him anyhow.

With a sigh, a ginger scrub of his plaid shirt cuff over his stinging lip, James Tiberius Kirk picked himself up off the highway, retrieved his satchel, and began the long 7-mile trudge home.


	2. … exf4

… **exf4**

Gambit accepted.

**Thesis.**

His father had taken two point two additional hours at the Education Institute, smoothing over Spock's violent outburst in the professional, polite and implacable way he might have tackled a diplomatic incident with a Klingon scimitar pressed to his jugular.

Diplomacy among Vulcans was a fascinating thing to behold (in other circumstances than one's own personal disgrace): a courtly, ritualistic dance of circumlocutions, at once dissembling, courteously neutral and cuttingly direct. The gist was plain: the half-breed would not be tolerated but for his respected position in the First House of Surak and any further outbursts would be the end of him. Sarek was no less plain: this never happened; if it is brought up at any time, in my son's presence or to his discredit, the slightly misdirected wrath of T'Pau would be felt on behalf of her House, if not her grandson. Sarek won.

Spock sat in the corridor for those two point two hours. It felt appropriately liminal – a stasis position until his fate was negotiated, and he had to clamp down hard on the urge to swing his legs or tap out the rhythm of his annoyance on the sleek Vish'aii wood of the bench, carved with its ancient runes of prosperity.

He was not afraid of the outcome of the conversation. His trust in his father's protection and authority were absolute, still the unwavering certainty of childhood that a father was a bulwark against anything and everything. Just not, he thought bitterly, against himself.

His father was truly Vulcan, face as mobile and expressive as an extrusive igneous shelf. Did Spock imagine the crushing look of disappointment in his eyes when he regarded him? Was it his own half-human frailties he was projecting onto the blank canvas of Sarek's face? His mind was reeling with half-felt, aborted emotions, ricocheting violently within him like loose firecrckers.

_I married your mother because it was logical._

The words tormented him on the hover-ride back to their suite, his father's mute and rigid presence making itself felt beside him with the silent, crushing force of a singularity.

Spock felt like he was churning inside, simmering, bubbling and bursting and ready to brim over. These feelings –something as ephemeral and indistinct as a state of mind, so easy to ignore, shield, supress – was now material, physical, rooted deep within him and making him vibrate with the energy of it.

He clenched his jaw imperceptibly.

Stonn's obnoxious little cousin and his friends. The irritation, the twinge of anxiety that made his shields vulnerable to their physical contact: the tendrils of disgust, contempt, the unmistakeable tinge of envy that had crept in through that contact. And then the roar, the rush of adrenalin and primal protective response of his mother, the overwhelming visceral rage that flooded his vision and made him gasp for air, the pounding of blood in his temples. So sudden, so new, so overwhelming, so primal. It had ripped through his shields like wet paper, welling over the dam and flooding his senses. Even now, it lingered like a green haze in his mind. His pulse, swift and fluttering like a hummingbird's wing, throbbed unpleasantly in his split lip. He could have killed him, maybe would have done if strong, adult, shielded hands had not pulled him away. He was terrified of himself, his delicate hands, bruised jade knuckles, looked alien to him. He could have committed one of the greatest crimes it was possible to commit in a moment of madness.

What was this?

They clearly felt emotion too. Spock had felt the emotions when Sirkar had pushed him. Vulcans were not immune: fear, hatred, animalistic lusts and impulses to violence, this crippling loneliness. It was not unique to his human legacy. But then, he knew that. The unspeakable time, the Plak Tow. If it was anything like his experience today, limbs quivering with it, pulse hammering, then Blood Fever was an accurate description.

Vulcans were trained, almost from birth, to control, suppress, shield, compartmentalise. The emotions, deep, consuming, were isolated, chained and buried. The surface was a pool, clear shallows of limpid thought where logic could prosper. Humans, he understood, had no such ability to regulate their feelings. Mental discipline for their species was difficult if not impossible to achieve. Meditation, study, choice of lifestyle could allow Humans a clarity of thought and purpose equal to that of a young Vulcan – in their conscious mind at least. But this took years of dedication to achieve and was consequently rare: nigh on impossible to achieve in the ordinary course of a life rich with experiences and novelties and the constant siege of others seeking to make emotional ties. For it to permeate into the unconscious mind was impossible. They dreamed, after all.

Since Humans could not regulate and segregate their feelings, they all ran loose in their conscious and unconscious minds like inks in a solution, merging and diluting, filling the clear spaces with streaks and smudges and blurs of colour. The human mind was a kaleidoscope of refracting thoughts and feelings. But because they were so unregulated they diluted one another, dissipated, bled out through every gesture, every expression, every word. Each touch conveyed a message that the recipient could only feel an echo of, that fled vainly to vanish in the air. To touch a Vulcan was to share the feelings with all their true potency, swarming over the contact point in a wild rush, jostling in to inundate the calm oasis of a Vulcan's mind, contaminating and polluting like black oil. It was overwhelming. It was to be avoided by all means.

But for all their vibrancy, their flashes and cloying intimacy, Human emotions, with their myriad outlets and siphons, were like tendrils of smoke compared to the wild, intense, imprisoned passions of Vulcans, whose feelings festered and gathered and clamoured against the shields that were constantly strengthened, shored and re-built to keep them at bay. Human emotions flitted and frittered away, ever replacing and ever shiftless.

Spock, as the son of an ambassador and the son of a Human, had always been encouraged to study and seek an understanding of other worlds and customs. His enthusiasm and single-mindedness in this pursuit had not been anticipated. Fortunately, obsession was not a word that existed in Vulcan. He had read widely in the literature and language of the majority of Federation home worlds and even what little he could locate of Klingon and Romulan tracts: scripture, laws, combat manuals, scholarly treatises, children's tales. Each scrap a clue, a puzzle piece of an unknown universe. Terran literature, his earliest interest, spoke often of emotion. It focused on character, on psychology, seeking to describe for others feelings that they must try to identify from within themselves and recognise in another.

Spock had found himself at a loss when his mother introduced him to various ancient texts that had garnered the title of Classics: Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Of Human Bondage, Therese Raquin. These books exemplified an observable social phenomenon that had been dubbed by popular psychology a 'love-hate relationship'. These two, supposedly most powerful and utterly conflicting emotions in the sentimental spectrum, become some inextricably bound together as to be almost indistinguishable. Either felt in rapid succession as two connecting points on a wheel, or, even more incomprehensibly, simultaneously and indelibly as one inherently conflicted sensation. To a Vulcan this was simply a concept too alien to translate and Spock had looked at the conundrum from all angles, able to rationalise it from what brief glimpses he had of his mother's emotional landscape, but utterly unable to understand or recognise it.

And yet, today, in that sudden catastrophic collapse of his trusted self-control, in that ensuing maelstrom of feelings, Spock finally understood. And it was terrifying.

These feelings were dangerous, frightening, rampant in his system like a toxin. His lack of control of was lamentable. His willingness to capitulate to these impassioned forces was a flaw that could undermine and crack open even his most carefully constructed shields. This was his Human legacy, his human weakness.

As he entered the high, vaulted atrium of their home, sandstone glowing ruddy in the evening light and Delta Vega's cold blankness cutting a white slither in the sky over the balcony rail, his father's tall, solemn step beside him, Spock felt suddenly and utterly alone.

Humans were doomed to being alone. No matter how much they tried to reach out, to share, connect themselves through webs of empathy, they could not. They were trapped in their own heads, like a wanderer lost on the fire-plains – an endless landscape to explore utterly alone.

But Vulcans had a gift, a way to forge a connection as beautiful and bright as two minds sinking together like falling stars. Something precious and fragile, the ghosting touch of two souls. But culture dictated that that was all it would ever be: privacy was fiercely protected and even a bond – that eternal meeting of minds – was as logical, calm and shielded as the rest. It was a traditional link to one's clan, it was a way to ensure the Blood Fever did not seek to destroy one's chosen bondmates in its violent madness. It could not destroy a part of Self, when all the shields came down.

Spock's parental bonds were a case in point: his father's was slender, utilitarian, strong and silent. His mother's was a thrumming, living coil, spilling over and leaking warm pulses of love and support and fond exasperation, and sometimes hurt or concern, that she did not even know she was sharing. To shield this off was the first thing he was ever taught. But every so often he would peel back a corner of his mind and just selfishly bask in the blissful security of his mother's all too human love for her son. It was his most precious possession.

He had not done so today. He had kept their bond carefully wrapped away from the swirl of his anger, protecting it, her, from himself. She was psi-null, defenceless against him if he let himself loose.

But then, as he stood in front of her, every inch the naughty schoolboy who hadn't been on the verge of beating another student to death, his mother just smiled in sympathy, abandoned all propriety, and pulled him into a rare and tight embrace. And it was as though her arms were physically shielding him for a moment from the face of his father's disapproval and all he could feel was that familiar tide of warmth and love and pride and concern seeping through her arms and into his mind, blending with all the rage and the violence and enveloping it. The tension, the fury, evaporated in the halo of his mother's bright concern like asteroids in a nova.

His eyes fluttered closed in ecstasy and a stray thought idly wondered if Sarek had ever allowed himself to feel his wife like this, to share something so wonderous.

But the touch was brief, almost momentary, and she was standing back under Sarek's brooding scrutiny, hands falling back to her sides, leaving him giddy and bereft. Spock greedily gathered those last wan strands and slammed a shield around them.

His father was watching them, inscrutable. He spoke quietly and firmly. "Spock, you must meditate. Clear your thoughts and rebuild your shields as you have been taught. You will attend the Institute again in the morning and further your studies." It was not a request.

Spock withdrew into his chamber, polished granite gleaming dully under the light-orbs. He removed his dark unyielding robes with its high, severe collar and slipped into a cream mandarin tunic and loose trousers that had been a gift from his mother on his last name day. The fabric rustled like the susurration of dry leaves as he settled on the meditation mat, looking at his split knuckles with something akin to wonder.

For twenty-three minutes he sat, regulating his breathing and trying to herd his skittish thoughts back into some semblance of order. The negative feelings of the day were still there, tugging at the periphery of his consciousness but the wash of contentment from his mother had settled in the forefront like a great well of brightness. The meditative state just would not come with it there, but Spock could not bring himself – not, just yet – to push that wonderful feeling away and baton it down. Maybe it would be the last time he would ever feel so cherished, so comforted, so blissfully loved.

With a barely audible exhalation, he stood and moved to the chess board, vines of mother of pearl in the dark mahogany, gemstones neatly arrayed.

Click, a pawn forward. Click, an opponent.

Spock let the logic of the game begin to soothe him like first shallow pull of a meditative trance, let the feeling remain just a few moments longer as the pieces began their elaborate dance.

**Antithesis.**

It was dark by the time he made it home and the wind had already blown off the last of the day's heat. He had jogged the last mile for lack of a jacket.

Jim knew where to tread to avoid the creaky board on the porch stair.

He gingerly lifted the latch and stepped inside. The house was dark and silent but that didn't necessarily mean much. Maybe Frank had drunk himself to sleep again. His mum had been due back on leave for a week now. He knew better than to hope she'd be there. A brief inspection of the front rooms and the garage confirmed that he was alone. Sam wouldn't be back for hours. Frank neither if he'd headed into town.

Jim paused as he turned to head out. Then slowly, cautiously, almost timidly, he turned back to the silhouetted shape of his dad's Mustang, hidden under the oil-stained tarp. He didn't realise he was holding his breath until he peeled back a corner, revealing the first glimmer of red paint and elegant silver curve of a cracked headlight. A shaky exhale as he ran his hand over this other, this memorial, this fellow thing that his dad had loved and left and now sat abandoned and corroding and subject to Frank's whims and abuses. His finger traced a fresh dent in the grill and his exhale was shaky.

It was so rare to be left alone with anything of his dad's and Jim's fingers were already at work, stripping and dragging, and he was swinging his legs over and sliding down the cold leather. It smelt of damp and moths and disuse and he sank into the driver's well, fingers drumming on the slim wheel and exhilaration swelling in his chest.

His imagination already put him miles away, wind whipping in his hair, a carpet of Fall leaves painting his windshield scarlet and gold, feeling much older, much surer, much braver. He could hear Sam whooping behind him as he took a bend almost recklessly fast, seamlessly, inch-perfect, his mother was beside him, head tipped back in delight and golden hair streaming in the wind, looking young, looking alive, looking at him…

Jim was quite unprepared for the swell of childish emotion that rose in his gorge like bile. The garage interior was shadowed and had the coldness of concrete. He was glad for a moment he hadn't turned on the light as he felt the wetness gathering on his lashes.

He swung his legs out from the pedals and up onto the seat, blinking furiously, feeling far too old to be crying about this again. He punched a thumb petulantly at the glove compartment and blinked as it swung open and something heavy fell out with a soft thud, swallowed in the gloom of the passenger's side.

He fumbled blindly for a moment, scrabbling in his hurry. His fingers felt the heaviness of it, the thickness, that slightly unfamiliar brittleness. Paper. A wedge of the stuff, cover slightly thicker and shinier under his roving touch. An old-style book. He hefted it in one hand as he raised it. Even in the darkness, he could see the colour was a violent yellow.

Suddenly it seemed important to get to his room, to get out of Frank's lair, absent or not. He clutched his unexpected prize to his chest, heart hammering, childish intuition telling him this was somehow significant, a door at the back of his closet, a label saying 'Drink Me', a loose floorboard full off letters. The book had a pleasing bulk, a substantiality that a PADD lacked.

He slipped back to the ground and left a lingering hand on the red, glinting door frame.

_One day_, he silently promised, _I'm gonna fix you right up and drive you the hell out of this shithole._

He pulled back the old cover with a gentleness bordering on the reverential and picked up the book from where he had placed it on the cold floor, breathless with anticipation. He tried to suppress it; this was probably one of Frank's betting bibles or something equally disappointing. Probably nothing. But it was a book. An honest-to-good book. Made from paper. And Frank wasn't the type for sentimental links to the past. So…

He laughed humourlessly as he crossed the yard and climbed the rickety old ladder to the barn loft. His life really must suck if the emotional highlight of his day was ten minutes in the dark with an obsolete piece of early transport machinery. Even an eleven year-old knew that that wasn't normal.

He clicked and the lamps flickered on; his main monitor flashed to life, followed by the whir of about twenty micro-routers. He'd been quite proud of that when he'd programmed the sensors last year. They'd been so rusted in the scrap heap that he'd doubted he'd be able to get them working. The routers were about seven years out of date, but a man was more than his hardware after all.

"Gimme the code, you stupid Mick!", the obnoxious voice demanded. He'd programmed the welcome screen to sound like a particularly gangster cartoon detective from the ToonFlix network and it usually raised a smile. Not today.

"Kelvin Twenty-two Thirty-three Zero Four, Computer." It was voice-recognition calibrated too.

"You gotcha, Macky." A pause. "Nothing doing today."

No messages. Nothing from his mom. He wasn't surprised. Recently, he couldn't even raise the energy to feel hurt.

This time, he didn't even notice; he flopped onto the mattress and stared at his bounty.

It was yellow. Bright, garish, cheap-looking yellow. A pasty white cartoon character with rough black features, which included a massive pair of nerdy spectacles, was offering him a cheesy thumbs-up and pointing at rather chubby-cheeked man in a black mitre who was cowering away from an enraged lady in white who seemed to be on the verge of hurling her crown at him. The title slanted up the diagonal in childish block print.

**CHESS FOR DUMMIES.**

Huh.

He tentatively opened it, feeling the frailty of the thin leaves within, when something on the cover plate caught his eye. A neat, tight note in the top right corner.

_Seriously, George, for all our sakes, take this and stop embarrassing yourself._

_You know she's never going to like you for your brains anyway, right?_

_Chris_

And then, just below, in a cursive wide achingly familiar script, almost hastily scribbled at an angle where his mother hadn't even bothered to turn the book upright:

_Ha! So now I know. But I'll marry you anyway, you big fraud._

Jim doesn't know for how long he's been staring at those words. That tiny, flippant, insignificant, fragile, perfect window into the past of this man, this hero, this gaping hole in Jim's life, a hole patched with PADD reports, newspaper cuttings, annual Starfleet condolence cards, the three holos he'd managed to rescue before his mom had destroyed the rest, the limited files he'd managed to hack without being caught in a security firewall. He clutched at the words like fleeting strands of a dream.

This hint, this glimpse, this precious clue into the world that existed before the Kelvin exploded into shrapnel.

He swallows slowly. Chris. Christopher Pike. His godfather. Another absentee figure in a burgundy uniform.

He opens the book like it's the most valuable thing in the world. He opens it and he begins to read, his eidetic memory already scanning, filing, devouring every word.

He reads long past Frank's drunken, swaggering collision with the fence post. He reads long past Sam cuts his engine and stumbles blindly into Frank's waiting fury.

He reads until the words blur and his head is falling, sleepily, onto the final pages as though he could simply absorb them through his skin and rosy-fingered dawn is prodding him through the uneven wall slats. He reads and he feels his dad with him, piecing him together from all those fragments he had gleaned of that short, bright life, frantically reading, laughing and absorbing this ridiculous joke gift from his ass of a best friend, and imagines with him that shocked and delighted look in his Chess Captain mom's eyes when Jock George Kirk proves for the first time he's not just a ladies man and a pretty face.


	3. Bc4 Qh4

**Bc4 Qh4+**

The Bishop's gambit. Black forces white to move his King and makes White unable to castle. Risky since puts Black's Queen in peril and allow White to eventually attack it with gain of tempo with Ng1-f3. A usual response is to move in with Knight instead, enabling the quick defensive strategy of 'castling' the King in the corner of the board;

**Thesis.**

His fingers skimmed over the fragile dust-jacket once more, picking up faint hums of childish delight, images – hundreds, all different, all overlaid in a transparent sensory lattice, of stars and garish implausible rockets and the flashes of solar flares – a century of childish human minds conjuring fantasies of space and other worlds as they read, the impressions pooling and scattering under his fingers, tiny and insubstantial as dust motes.

Spock stood, the strict freshly-purchased charcoal instructor's uniform following the rigid lines of his body. He walked over to the bookshelf and slipped it in between a pair of costly antique treatises on early flight machines that Star fleet considered suitable decoration for his otherwise sterile, gleaming new office.

This book, Spock realised, this childhood Terran fiction that he had pushed aside as soon as his father had found him reading it, was an apt metaphor for the reason he was currently a senior Starfleet science and not a stiff, starched-robed acolyte of the Vulcan Science Academy. Insults to his maternal heritage aside, they would never have truly claimed him.

Vulcans had postulated the existence of sentient life in the universe beyond the confines of their own planet as soon as someone had calculated that the likelihood that every star in the known firmament failing to produce the conditions sufficient for the organic evolution of life (as we know or otherwise) was approximately Seventeen-hundred million eight-hundred and ninety-two thousand six-hundred and fifty-nine to One… Even if it did require the requisite minimum 1.5 hundred million years to have passed for it to have developed beyond protoplasm to a point of recognisable sentience. Vulcans had known it was not so much a matter of if, as a matter of when: the early diplomacy with Earth to form the nascent Federation had been a formal speech of protectionism that hadn't needed all that much dusting of after several hundred years. You stay on your planet, we stay on ours, we share things of value: knowledge and information. Vulcan would not be debased by unnecessary contact with inferior life forms.

But Humans… Humans hadn't calculated the odds. Humans had simply _intuited_ that they were not alone. They had felt it somewhere in that fictitious imaginative organ they referred to as a 'gut'. They had written books, plays, vid-scripts, creating visions of a future in space of which they could not possible conceive. And of course, vainly and naively, their depictions of alien life did little to elucidate on the unknown and were largely superficial reflections of Humans themselves in different guises… simply exploring elements of their own humanity presented back to them. But they still challenged themselves, offered themselves up to the criticism of the unknown, the different. It was no coincidence that Earth was the driving force of the Federation's exploration and diplomacy.

And that was what Spock wanted. Not to simply extrapolate a little bit further from what he already knew, chipping away at a known uncertainty with logic until the probabilities narrowed in on new understanding.

He wanted revelation, immersion, to stand in darkness and experience that sudden Human flood of light as whole new vistas opened up, new galaxies and new worlds. _All I know is that I know nothing. _If nothing more, he sympathised with his mother's people in this way most of all. Compared to the universe, he was small, he was fallible and he was ignorant. But he wanted that to change. Vulcan smug surety was a hard position to maintain if you didn't fully believe it.

And what did the universe consist in? Vulcans would say principles, regressions to patterns and certainties that needed to be charted, predicted, understood. Humans would say people, perceptions, diversions, anomaly after anomaly after fascinating anomaly.

This, Spock was sure, was the home of true science.

But if they insisted on approaching it in that romantic, irrational, entirely chaotic and incompetent manner, he did not have to like it.

Spock switched on his tertiary screen and began scanning the first results his senior astro-technician had processed, apparently, with the finesse of a Parvik-mincer wielded by a Galvatian lumberjack. Long fingers flew in a blur across the PADD as he furiously began to annotate, eyebrows drawn down with concentration, efficiently eviscerating the sloppy code and weaving it into something concise, tight and functional.

**Antithesis.**

A couple of months later Jim had tried giving up on school altogether, but then then the attendance monitor had rung Frank and then Jim had been rewarded for his three days of freedom with a smarting backhand and a chipped canine. It had been almost casual: this is what happens if some snotty teacher gives me a blue ear again.

He'd managed to memorise about six-hundred standard chess opening sequences for both dimensions in that time and been soundly thrashed for the first time by the Vanderblik Matrix – the most sophisticated chess program currently available to the public.

Neither hide not hair of Sam had been seen for four days straight, this time.

Finally his grousing motor could be heard spluttering in the drive before cutting out with a cough of exhaust. It was Saturday morning and Frank had some day-work at the loading bays.

Sam'd come into the kitchen, leather jacket loose on his narrow shoulders, blood-eyed with the previous nights' excesses, pupils blown unnaturally large. He poured himself a tumbler of orange juice and started at the Formica work-top, where it had been chipped and scuffed with a kitchen knife, for a long moment before turning to the silent shadow in the doorway. He recognised his old baseball pullover hanging loose on the gangly boy.

"Hey, Squirt."

"Hey, yourself." Jim found it hard to keep the relief out of his voice. Sam's voice was gravely and hoarse. He sounded much older than he looked, the cloy of cigarettes lingering, his brown hair wild from the helmet. He was slight for seventeen and not tall. Jim's runty frame would no doubt follow suit.

"What happened to your face, huh?"

Jim shrugged one arm, "I skipped out on school and Frank found out."

Sam didn't blink, eyes raking his younger brother's livid jaw, as he took another long swig of juice. He swallowed, gullet pulsing, then wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It was a deliberate gesture, one that dispensed with social niceties. Jim catalogued it for use later, liking it.

"Why'd'you do that, Jimmy? Why give him an excuse like that?" Jim didn't point out Sam's own truancy statistic, currently hovering in the mid-eighties, nor his latest four-day nonappearance and simply shrugged again.

"I'm seventeen, Squirt, and flunked out eleventh grade twice. You, kid, are like some sort of genius. School is your ticket out of this dive." Jim felt the blush starting under his collar at his older brother, his hero's, casual praise. Sam nodded out the kitchen window, planting the tumbler down, dirty, in the drying rack. He indicated the battered bike, keeling on its kickstand, "That there? That's mine."

He paused, just gazing at it, his hair making him look windswept and a little wild. He spoke his next words quietly, to the wall. "I've been working at a spacer garage down in Mountford; not much but I can save up."

Jim could feel his heart constricting painfully in his chest. Sam had talked of leaving every day in the last five years. Ever since mom just stopped coming back at all. This was just more of the same.

"What about Mom?" Sam had always insisted she was coming back. Jim knew better but his brother's naïve trust was infectious and sometimes he too stared at the horizon as though willing the headlights of her transport to wink into existence.

Sam's eyes, a watery insubstantial sort of blue were glassy and reflected the low clouds, "I dunno, Jimmy. She'll just have to come and look me up, I guess."

He turned, shoulders bunched and vulnerable, and he finally met Jim's eye and managed a proper smile. Jim moved forward almost involuntarily until he was clasped in the familiar loose embrace, tucked into the taller side. Sam smelt of motor oil, burnt rubber and the acrid burn of spirits. "I dunno how I wound up with a genius for a kid brother, Jim, but I guess I'm glad that someone got the brains. You still got your little nerd cave hidden in the old cow shed?" Jim smothered a grin into the leather, welcoming the teasing, pushing aside the irritation that Sam pretended to be stupid in order to be popular. He caught a faint whiff of stale perfume – something floral and sickly - and frowned.

"Yeah, you haven't seen it in a while. I've rigged up some new processors and I'm working on getting into…" He paused, re-choosing his words, "… into some extra classes at some of the Colleges."

If Sam spotted the hesitation he didn't show any sign; his fingers were idling at the nape of Jim's neck, playing with the blonde strands, and Jim wanted to lean into the rare contact like a puppy.

"School not enough for you now, huh?"

Jim smiled, regretfully as the fingers withdrew and Sam turned away again. He answered proudly, as he had done when he'd handed his mom his first school report and she hadn't been able to look at him for a week. _He's so like George. I can't stand it, Frank, I can't stand him watching me._ "I've finished the whole standard curriculum and I'm just working through the last of the AP humanities. I'd like to do some more computer science stuff, mainly, I guess."

Now Sam's eyes narrowed, dark brows beetling, "You haven't been hacking into anything again have you? The school went bat-shit when you were caught. And Frank…" They both remembered the crash as the baseball bat had shattered his PADDs into splinters and the sparks as the screen started belching smoke.

They'd caught him aged nine, hacking into the advanced class materials. At first they had accused him of cheating and threatened to kick him out. It had taken him six-months to let the dust settle and pluck up the courage to simply ask. Now, he had a scholarship and was allowed to read what he wanted. Now, he hid his brains in the loft where Frank's bad leg – the one that stopped him getting regular manual work, that had seen his early retirement from 'Fleet security services – stopped him entering. Now, he made sure his virtual trail was almost invisible, chameleon-like as it snuck between the firewalls and scattered into nothingness at the first hint of detection. Sub-routine after sub-routine made sure he'd never be caught so easily again.

Jim knew he looked shifty, but Sam wasn't looking. He had snagged one of Frank's beers and had chipped it open on a chair back in a way that just looked forced and not even slightly badass. Just inexplicably distant and wrapped up in his own thoughts, not sensing how much Jim needed him, wanted from him.

"You sticking around today?" Jim didn't like how pathetically hopeful he sounded. "We could play chess?" He liked that idea, that this could be a thing for them, something of their parents that they could share.

Sam barked a laugh, "Chess! You really are setting you heart on being the Nerd King, ain't ya? I don't do chess." Something must have shown on Jim's face, some hint of hurt or disappointment or something. "But I can sure as hell whip your ass on the vid-cube, come on!" And in an instant he was back to being bright, young, geeky Sam, flopping onto the old sofa – not the one Frank liked – and was sliding on the goggles, game-control in hand. Jim was on him in an instant, in a tamgle of spindly limbs, laughing, fighting for the better control-stick, being nudged none too gently in the ribs and loving the easy rough and tumble of having his brother back - if only for now.

Somewhere in the Riverside loading bay, Frank Sullivan was being laid off for another month as the Fleet had finished up for the winter. The bars on the route home were looking inviting and his mood was darkening and gathering like a storm at sea.

High in the milking barn loft, a .textfile was painstakingly churning out endless combinations of decryption data. Pages and pages of flickering lines of code, churning through Jim's latest algorithm.

A pause.

Denied.

30 lines.

Denied.

Another line.

There was a pause.

And a beep.

Accepted.

The StarFleet logo, silver on crimson, flooded the screen with its generic welcome message to Academy students.


	4. Kf1 B5!

**Kf1 B5?!**

Black has moved his Queen forward to H4 – exposing her – but forcing White to move his King along the row to F1 to avoid instant peril. White cannot move a pawn in defence as it Black's pawn would already be lying in wait to open up for the Queen. White cannot castle on either side. Black had a number of options, but elected the gambit that sacrificed a pawn in order to force White's Bishop of its diagonal that threatened the weakness in Black's ranks. Both sides are equal in numbers now, but Black has limited his manoeuvrability.

**Thesis.**

Not for the first time, Spock evaluated the correctness of his decision to leave the planet of his birth.

In terms of his accustomed biological parameters, it was cold here. If he had insufficient control of his body to let it act reactively, he might have shivered.

Spock did not have pores, an evolutionary response to the undesirable loss of water through sweat in a desert climate, so at least heat was efficiently conserved by the same means. Thermostatic homeostasis was largely regulated through his conscious mind. Therefore Spock was aware that he was cold and aware that he could safely endure it without compromising his overall efficiency. Mere comfort was secondary.

He adjusted the cuff on his charcoal grey jacket; it was a fraction too small and exposed a pale wrist, faint milky green veins forming the tracery of a delta beneath the pale skin. Starfleet uniforms were fashioned from an adaptable polymer designed to regulate the body's temperature but these were largely made for Human specifications. A Vulcan-specific garment was unfortunately still under development.

Spock, perplexed by the unaccountable delay in the Material Sciences laboratory, had begun the synthesis of his own chemical compound in-between official duties and was anticipating that he would be able to supply the recalcitrant team with a variety of potential options before the week was out in order to stimulate their research progress. The idea that Humans were not as efficient multi-taskers as Vulcans owing to their need for regular sleep merely added to the statistical unlikelihood that the species should have proved so successful in Inter-Galactic research and exploration.

As it was, his grey homespun jumper – tucked into his storage trunk with his other meagre personal effects – was being called to serve on a number of unobserved occasions. He did not pack it and Spock deduced his mother's contribution from the thoughtful care it demonstrated and the faint sent of Mitan'y'a root oil that clung, citrusy and bright, to the collar.

Spock did not think he could be less Human.

His mother, quiet, highly intelligent and long used to emotional reserve, had done nothing to ready her son for this sudden emersion in his recessive heritage. The noise, the easy familiarities, the gross violations of decorum. He had studied the humour, he had studied the idioms, he had studied the mating practices (or perhaps, as it should correctly be termed, the dating practices), he had studied the physiology, he understood the broad range of cultural influences from different geographical regions of Terra's surface. He had studied and he had thought he had understood.

The Vulcan Science Academy was the single goal of every Vulcan student. It was the only recommended course of education. It represented the pinnacle of academic achievement in mathematics and quantum physics. It closely guarded its research and only operated through carefully regulated information exchanges with other Federation planets.

Starfleet was erratic, inefficient, and operated via unfathomable heuristic learning principles: the 'trial and (inevitable) error', the inexplicable 'rules of thumb', oxymoronic 'intuitive judgments', or, worst of all, the entirely indefensible 'educated guess'. Parsimony, and related concepts of eradicating errors of logic, seemed practically unheard of.

Spock's left eyebrow had made a bid for freedom when he had discovered the lack of centralised databanks. Multiple research fellows, not to mention students, had overlapping areas of investigation and had made no effort to coordinate their conclusions. Outdated publication systems seemed to be the only way of discovering the confusing array of hypotheses and studies that had been completed, often contradictory and filed under the incorrect title: why, someone please inform him, was singularity µ-type radiation theory only to be located in a supplement to the American Philological Journal?

Not only did they have no idea of what it was that they did not know, but apparently they had very little idea of what they _did _know. The mystery of Humanity's progress beyond the occasional uncontrolled explosion was a thing of acute xenological interest.

The VSA was a researcher's paradise: ordered, quiet, focused, documented.

But he had turned it down.

For reasons that he did not which to analyse too closely since they appeared to be decidedly human in heuristic application: a moment of so-called intuition.

_The disadvantage of your human mother. _

Suddenly his whole past, his whole future was spread before his eyes in a perfect continuum: it was a moment of sublime clarity of perspective. Always struggling, always pushing himself to surpass his peers, to justify his existence to people that had already prepared their own conclusions. Jumping hurdle after hurdle. Never free.

Spock knew, in that moment of absolute lucidity, that this was not acceptable.

He was ambitious – utterly logical to strive towards high aspirations and to be determined in one's pursuits – but his potential, whatever that should prove to be, could simply not be fully realised in conditions that were adversely set against him. Far better to work in an environment that fostered his talent, saw him as an asset and not as a liability.

And to accept this honour, this sublime condescension, was to betray the only person who unconditionally loved him.

And here he was. But was this environment not set against him? After only a few months, the number of administrative and circumstantial obstacles to true research had overwhelmed his capacity to get on with a single project of his own. He was initially supervising only a small computer science contingent as an introduction to potential professorial candidacy (his credentials had naturally fast tracked him) and even the five innocuous mousy heads in labcoats had generated enough inefficiencies and downright absurdities to occupy him through several sleep cycles. Now, he had discovered this sample to be representative of the entire Starfleet system of operations.

It was barely tolerable.

Spock restrained the slight urge to shiver as gust of cool air followed the opening of his door. He did not look up, but flexed his fingers once over the PADD keys reflectively, and added the last flourish on Starfleet's new CDP: Centralised Data Program.

"Sir?"

The low voice was rough. A throat-clearing followed - undignified, loud. Humans seemed to make a number of extraneous noises. Spock had noted that this was often as result of their bodies apparently entering a number of standby settings should the inhabitant mind fail to actively keep on the alert. Likewise, Spock had observed from his mother, a surfeit of thought could delay and perturb sleep. A most inefficient combination. But Vulcans did have an unusually high degree of mind-body coordination.

"Sorry, did I interrupt your work?" The voice sounded smoother now although still with a slight hitch that Spock was starting to recognise as the discourtesy of a smothered laugh. It was not illogical to extrapolate on that. It seems uncontrolled displays of humour was a way in which Humans disguised feelings of inadequacy or intimidation. The anticipating apology likewise.

Spock pushed the Padd aside, delicately, letting the screen liquify into a power-neutral silver, like molten mercury coalescing beneath his fingertips.

"No, Mr Wellesly; I have just concluded my most recent task. How may I assist you?"

The cadet had begun inauspiciously under his tutelage, having been recently added to his research team as a means of securing extra credit for a failed science sub-major examination in his second year of the command track.

Spock's deduction from the – the emotive word 'dismal' seemed justified in these circumstances - failure mark and a brief perusal of his wider academic record was supplemented by the striking nature of the man's features.

He was tall, broad shouldered and his smile was improbably white. Spock posited artificial veneers as a likely explanation, since human bone exposed to the typical erosions of diet for twenty years should not produce such a pristine brilliancy.

The man was dark haired, with a strong clean-cut jawline and rakish black brows, the hint of an afternoon shadow.

This man was not in the Command stream on academic merit; therefore, some other unfamiliar principle of leadership lauded among humans was to be expected. Spock regarded the intruder much in the way he would regard an interesting specimen.

The man, for despite his obvious youth he indeed seemed fully mature, finally insinuating himself beyond the doorjamb and answered him with a blinding smile.

"Uh, I don't need anything in particular, sir, I, er, just haven't really met a Vulcan before… Up close and personal." The awkward delivery of the words were in no way reflected in the cadet's confident almost bullish posture, wide-legged, forearms tanned dark by the sun crossed in front of him.

"As a founding member of the Federation, Vulcan has maintained a constant presence on Earth. However, as a species that values its privacy, I am unsurprised at your lack of exposure."

The man's grin, if anything, broadened as though Spock had just said something highly amusing. Spock re-examined his response and found nothing likely to qualify.

"A Vulcan in Starfleet; man, I guess it's our lucky day."

"I do not see why this diurnal cycle should prove particularly propitious on that basis."

"And so modest!" Cadet Wellesley's smile glinted in the industrial strip light. Spock tilted his head slightly and stood, finger pads pressed lightly to the cool desk surface. It was new and gave off no psychic vibrations but those of his own familiar calculations.

"I assure you, I did not intend to misrepresent my projected contribution. I merely observe that fortuity is, by definition, random and your construction is, therefore, most illogical." Spock paused, realising that he had unwittingly been drawn into an exchange of human social 'pleasantries' with which he had no experience. "Please specify the purpose of your visit."

Wellesley ignored him. "Do you always talk like this?"

"I am uncertain to what you are alluding."

"You know, like a robot. Is Vulcan super-formal as a language or something?"

"I was unaware that my lexical selections were in any way… artificial in their choice or delivery. I am not using a Translator device and the lack of authenticity is not a result of overly-literal translation." The cadet had the good grace to look lightly abashed. An eyebrow quirked as Spock seriously considered the question, not as a casual rudeness, but a serious cultural-relations question posed to a professor. "Vulcan, as does Earth, has a wide variety of regionally distinct dialects and a uniform language – equivalent to your Standard – that has achieved unilateral dominance through time and cultural globalisation. Whereas Standard achieved such dominance through economic dominance and mass-media, _Is-kalak_ was the language of academics and as such is neutral in register and diverse in vocabulary to enable greater precision in explanation."

Spock found himself with a question, "Why do you, as a species, have such a variety of words available and insist on using the most simple and least specific of those to convey your meaning? I asked Mr Pacheco how his yocto-chip project1 was progressing, to which he responded, 'Just fine, Professor'. I find that from that descriptor I am no wiser as to the state of his work. Why employ dialogue that involves an inferred sub-text?"

Wellesley blinked, unprepared for the sudden turn in conversation. He had not had a plan, as such, when he had snuck in on his attractive, mysterious and disconcertingly forthright supervisor, but this particular turn of events certainly had not been it. A bit of teasing – universally interpreted as flirting – would see him either with the hottest date on campus or a fail in compsci… But now the Vulcan's burning gaze was boring into him as though he was a fascinating cryptography problem that he was mentally undressing and he wasn't half turned on by it.

"Uh, not really sure, sir. I guess… Do you like coffee?"

Spock's eyebrow ricocheted off his hairline, the only thing that betrayed his utter bemusement a the non-sequitur. "I do not know."

Disbelief. "You've never had coffee? Seriously?"

"What is the advantage of this beverage?"

"Well, it's, er, steamin' hot and caffeinated and bitter and smells fantastic and is pretty much the ichor of the gods to most sentient beings."

"I infer that caffeine is extoled for its properties as a stimulant. Since I metabolise at a rate approximately 3.87 times faster than the average human male between the ages of 16 and 23 Terran years, it is unlikely to have the desired effect."

The cadet looked somewhat deflated at that news, the megawatt grin drooped a little at the edges.

Spock felt the beginnings of a shiver prickle at the back of his neck and supressed it smoothly. "However, I would not be averse to partaking in something 'steaming hot', as you put it. I will wait for you to locate your jacket."

The grin lit up like a solar flare and Spock was oddly gratified that his first foray into an entirely gratuitous social exchange had produced such spectacular results.

**Antithesis.**

Jim awoke in the darkness, gasping, heart-hammering and a slick, familiar stickiness pooling at his groin. "Fucking hell… Wow, fuck…" He drew in a heady breath, the chill damp air telling him he'd dozed off in the barn again, the holes in the ill-fitting corrugated iron having let in a pair of moths who were now winging a ghostly gavotte in the half-light. He tried not to do that too often – fall asleep in the barn - lest Frank finally take it upon himself to track him down and destroy this last haven of solitude. But the barn was ramshackle and on the furthest edge of the fallow field than ran sharply uphill, nestled in a thicket of scrub, making it barely visible from the farmhouse he had once called home.

These dreams had been sneaking up on him with increasingly regularity, several in the last year, but since his thirteenth birthday it was like a time-bomb had gone off in his groin. Sometimes it was names, faces, dialogue, elaborate fantasy seductions and he'd wake warm and lazy and wet and have to shake his head to clear the lingering fog of sensations and warm brushes of skin. Sometimes it was just a darkness, a heat, faint whispers of identity and he awoke in a warp rush, synapses exploding like stars behind his eyes and coming so hard he nearly blacked out again.

This time it was a bit both: it was Lily Shepherd, icy blonde and haughty. She was in his class in school and had never deigned to say a word to him. It drove him wild, that automatic prejudice, that pitiless unattainability. She had eyes as blue as his own and a fringe of long black lashes that fluttered against her cheek as looked coyly down. She had tiny dimples, barely pin pricks, and small puffy lips; she was like a china doll. She was too superior to look twice at the pathetic loner that was always disrupting the class for attention, always doodling something on his PADD under the desk when he was meant to be working, always tapping his scuffed converses with impatience.

Those puffy doll lips had been wrapped around his cock, leaving a shining trail of saliva, as those blue, blue, periwinkle eyes fixed on his with something like worship. Her uniform was ripped hastily open, her breasts were small and taut against their white lacy confines. So virginal, so haughty, so filthy. Her mouth was hot and slick and her lips sealed perfectly around the suction. She had begged him to let her suck him, pleaded to be allowed to feel the heat of him, taste his seed. She knew now how wrong she had been, how lucky she was to feel him, how sorry for laughing when her brother had stolen his lunch money again.

But then those glassy eyes were changing, the lashes still long, still girlish, but the brows heavy, the rasp of stubble on his jaw and it was her brother there on his knees. He wasn't begging, he was taking. His mouth was greedy, violent, a vacuum of desire, his long throat was drawing him down to the root. Jim's hands were tangled in the messy hair, pretending to be in control. Jim could feel the power of him, this older boy, whose strong football arms were braced against his thighs, bruising him, wresting away his desire from him like an assault. This cruel, stupid boy with his jock's jaw-line and ropy shoulders suddenly had a mouth – with those swollen obscene lips like his sister's - that was the centre of Jim's universe.

Just as Jim could feel his balls starting to tighten, that panicked arrhythmia of breath, that moment of suspension on the edge of a precipice, the image darkened to blackness. He could still feel a mouth on him, the curl of sure, warm fingers around his shaft, some indelibly masculine scent in the air. But the dark hotness that claimed him, that greedily swallowed the explosion of his need and lathed him with a nimble tongue, was neither cringing nor controlling. It was intense and rapt and sure and Jim awoke with an overflow of _want want want_.

When the familiar angles of the barn resolved themselves in the gloom and the cold air began to feel uncomfortable on his damp shorts, all the details faded into that mysterious featureless longing which lingered elusively as the last shreds of the dreamscape vanished into morning.

"Computer, time." His voice felt rougher, deeper.

"Good morning, Jim. Did you have nice night? It's 5:00 am, handsome." The latest upgrade to his interface may have been a mistake; the sultry southern strains of a synthesised pay-per-minute girl breathed huskily over the speakers and Jim felt himself involuntarily blushing.

"Um, thanks. Computer, get up the latest game with Xiao."

"Sure thing, honey." A flicker as the board flickered onto his nearest monitor, making Jim blink furiously at the sudden brightness. "Congratulations, Jim. Qin Xiao has resigned. White has won the match. Do you wanna to play again?" The computer purred, the automated request sounding incongruously flirtatious.

"What, already?" He peeled back the tangled sheet and eyed his opponent's last move with disgust. "He's not even trying. Jeez."

Qin Xiao, Chinese 2-d chess prodigy, had agreed to a series of online matches with one of Jim's numerous avatars. Jim had soundly thrashed him in every one and now he was apparently beating an ungraceful retreat. Whatever.

The three-dimensional games had been proving more challenging, encouraging numerous simultaneous strategies and sudden shifts of focus between strata. The computer programs meant he was learning fast though, and soon he was going to run out of virtual opponents.

Jim stretched his arms above his head, feeling the pleasurable ache of last night's pull-ups deep in his newly-discovered deltoids. He swiped the Xiao window closed with finality and ordered, "Lights, seventy per cent." There was no shower system out here, never mind a fancy sonic system, and Jim had to slide un-dignifiedly down the ladder as he tried to keep as little of the cooling and slimy semen from rubbing uncomfortably between his thighs as possible, then waddle bow-leggedly towards the old metal water trough. He grimaced as the icy rainwater made sharp contact with his sleepy skin and did his best to clean up the worst of the evidence, clenching his jaw against the burn of coldness on his sensitive cock. Nothing like a cold shower the old fashioned way.

He climbed back up the ladder and settled himself comfortably in front of the screens, pulling a jersey over his head against the morning chill as they all hummed into life. A moth tickled his ear for a moment before he absently swatted it away.

It was hours before he needed to run the 7-mile track into town. He had whittled it down to just over an hour and was trying to beat his own records with each daily attempt. Now, he had time to begin the latest first-year mechanical engineering course assignments before downloading the fourth-year computer science onto his personal PADD for the rest of the day. There was only so much interest one could feign in beginners calculus day after day when you'd already finished the Berkley mathematics Master's degree course. He had nothing else to do after all: no friends, no team sports, no family. Sam could be detected these days only by the ion trail of dirty laundry he seemed to leave in his wake. A few words here and there every few days, but they were like ships meeting in the night.

He ran a distracted hand through his corn-thatch of blonde hair and began to look at the first warp-core schematics, one hand flicking through the images as the other absently tapped in notes and observations. The preliminary propulsion equations – he pulled up the relevant quantum theory papers and began a close cross-reference of the variables. Minutes bled into hours as he single-mindedly hunched over the material, brain stripping and storing and arranging like a photon processor. It was exhilarating, the feeling that he had embarked on this sheer mountain-face of information that was building with every new report, every new study. Now was the gruelling ascent, to map the terrain and find the finger-holds and pinches and muscle on upwards. Then, at the apex, he knew there would be a view worth fighting for. He would be able to stand, to survey, and to plant the next seeds of his own. The sum of federation knowledge and, perhaps, beyond was simply waiting on his processors to be read and understood. A life time wasn't enough. He sure as hell wasn't going to sit around and wait to be taught.

A momentary hesitation and an intermediate Orion conversation workfile was added to the day's tasks on his PADD.

When it was past seven he headed down the hill to the house. The clod was wet and slippery between his toes, kicking up flecks of mud up the backs of his calves and he whooped as he began to gather momentum, pelting headlong, always dangerously on the verge of losing his footing. He slowed as he reached the back door, breath pluming in the air. Frank wouldn't be up yet; it had been a heavy night. He slipped into the house for a quick shower and change, snatching Sam's discarded red biker jacket on his way out. He slipped it on, liking the way it made him feel older, invulnerable. Satchel slung over one shoulder, he set his stop watch and began the familiar road, sneakers slapping on the tarmac, the burn in his lungs a vital pleasure of burgeoning adolescence.

The day passed in a blur; he barely noticed the shuffle between classes, fingers still flicking, typing. In Federation History & Politics he was looking at the latest chains of complex polymers, developed for high radiation resistance. In Organic Chemistry, he was looking at the effects of gravitational anomalies on sub-light sensor circuits. In Math, he was reading the second catechism of Surak, High Vulcan lexicon disabled. In Advanced Astro, he was reading a comparative analysis of rimworld colonial constitutions and the potential significance of Federal homogeneity. In Computer Science he was beating the Dubrovnik 3-D chess program after he read the final exam material for programming search-and-gather automata.

He spoke to no one, the teachers knew better than to ask questions of the bowed head at the back. He spared a self-deprecating smile at the back of Lily Shepherd's glossy head.

Suddenly it was six and the janitors were sweeping out the stragglers and Jim was running, fit to burst, down the long, straight road home, jacked into something with an erratic electro beat and a throbbing bass line that settled beside his heartbeat. The bullies were too lazy to chase him, now, and his heels kicked up a cloud of dust.

He was on the porch when he heard it, Frank's whiney, weak voice on the comm. He pulled out the sonic transmitter and pressed an ear to the crack.

"Sure, I'll drive it round tomorrow. Yessir, you got yourself a sweet deal. A real classic convertible, with hardly a scratch…"

He recognised the voice, and yet didn't recognise it. Frank always sounded so reasonable, so responsible, so trustworthy when he wanted to. He sounded like a fifth grade teacher, Mr Picket-Fence. That's why no one had ever believed Sam in school. There was nothing of the belligerent drunk, the layabout, the deadbeat, the mindless thug who struck first and apologised later, who left porn Holos on the screen and stains on the couch.

Just the all-American stepfather of two whose high-flying widow of a war hero trusted with her most precious boys while she was off scanning algae somewhere in the gamma quadrant.

"Of course, I wouldn't expect less, sir… Test-drive, uh huh uh huh, yup, sure… It's nice to talk to another connoisseur of fine machinery, sir… 1973… Sports red… Not worth a credit less..."

Jim's blood ran cold. George's car. Their car. He couldn't. He had no right.

He could do what he damn well wanted and mom wouldn't even know, or care.

There was a rushing in his ears. Jim punched the doorpost hard enough to draw blood, angry splinters protruding from the welt.

The voice paused, turned, "Kid, is that you? … Hey mister, I gotta go. My son's just got home, I'll swing round at about 16:00 if that suits you? Great, great, have yourself a nice evening now…" The beep of the earpiece the earpiece being disconnected.

"Jim-boy? You there, son?" Jim gritted his teeth and pulled the leather sleeve down over his swelling knuckles before he shouldered through the door.

1 yocto – is a prefix similar to nano – , but instead of being 10^9 it is 10^24.


End file.
